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storytellers howled in rage and shook imaginary bars. They had captured it and brought it back here? Surely not. A man gestured to the east. Moralin imagined she heard skulkuk snorts through the chatter.
    Finally an elder spoke rapidly, shaking her fist toward Moralin. Another shouted. Moralin felt the heat of the fire on her scalp and smelled smoke and meat and skins, but it all seemed unreal. One part of the circle bulged, and Figt was pushed into the center. She stood swaying slightly before the elders.
    Moralin leaped to her feet, stunned with hatred. She forced herself to not look away from the fevered glare in the eyes of her old enemy. Around the circle people shouted opinions and comments. When the old woman raised her hands high, the murmurs died away. She said something in the voice of whitest doom.
    Green Cloak spoke next, but his accent was so terrible Moralin would not have recognized the Delagua words except that he said each one so slowly. “You are brave. You are The People now.” He gestured to show what he meant by The People. Arkera. He was trying to say, “You are Arkera now.”
    Her head buzzed. “No,” she said softly. “Let me die.”
    Back in the hut she refused to raise her head from the blanket. Starvation was not a fighter’s death, but it was her only choice. How much did it hurt to die that way?
    She wondered, again, if they had killed Song-maker. If his people walked the whole flat earth, did they also walk the round sky? It was a comfort to think that perhaps he would appear again to guide her through the strange world of the afterdead.
    What about Figt? Whatever the man in the green cloak said had made the girl hang her head with a look even Moralin could tell meant shame and suffering. Perhaps Moralin would have another chance to fight her enemy after death.
    For a week Moralin hardly moved. They poured water into her mouth, but they could not make her eat. At first hunger clawed her stomach, but then it went away. She dreamed her life was a huge yellow eye that was slowly closing. Let the dim light leach the red from her blood. Let her teeth darken. Even prayers could do no good in this wretched place so far from the lands the Great Ones watched over.
    Outside the hut she heard the musical sound of oil being poured into clay jars. She could smell fish, probably strung to dry. Inside the hut she heard the whisper and scurry of small animal feet, but she did not see any living things except the women who forced water into her throat, the girls who placed gourds of food near her and rushed away.
    One day she slipped into a half-waking state in which she mostly imagined herself back home. White beetles scurried over her hands, and she welcomed them because they spoke to her of death. Once, when she was a little girl and standing with Grandmother in the temple, she’d been frightened by a ghostly figure woven into the tapestry.
    Grandmother had turned quickly away. “Such come for us when we die. It’s forbidden to look upon them except on tapestries.”
    â€œIs it a spirit?”
    â€œNo. Only a priestess wearing a dui-dui.”
    As she got older, she had learned that priests came to the house on the day after death. Sometimes, depending on the time of the moon, the priests carried salts. Other times they carried only jars of spices, beeswax, frankincense, and the golden tree sap that came from a faraway golden city. No one else entered the room. Every time day and darkness came and went twenty-five times, the moon shut its evil eye for three nights, now helpless to steal people’s spirits. On the first dark night, the city fell silent. People hid in their houses while priestesses in dui-dui clothing carried the bodies to temple safety. But Moralin would have no one to carry her. Her only hope was that the beetles might whisper of her death to a passing feverbird, and thus the news would finally reach Cora Linga at the temple.
    One of the